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Seeing and Speaking: A Reply to Professor WolterstorffCHRISTOPHER A. DUSTINI welcome Professor Wolterstorff's gloss on my reading of theoria as "that mode of contemplation which, rather than being disinterested and disengaged, is participatory, in that it incorporates acknowledgement of the worth of what is contemplated," and of art (or craft) as a "making visible of what is worthy of such participatory contemplation." This becomes the turning point between what Professor Wolterstorff describes as my account of liturgy and the alternative he proposes. He has a different understanding of the kind of participation liturgy is meant to foster. For him, what is fundamental is not "the contemplation of some pattern in the kosmos, nor...of some work of art." The fundamental model "is that of engagement with a person." This person is God. One objection he makes to my recollection of the classical Greeks is that they "all thought of the divine as impersonal." But I sense a further objection, in that the persons whom liturgy enables us to engage include other human persons as well. I can easily see how the way in which we are used to thinking about contemplation would seem to exclude this interpersonal dimension. The way of thinking about contemplation I am proposing is different, of course, but not enough to satisfy Professor Wolterstorff, who thinks of liturgy "as being, in good measure, not contemplation but dialogue. The people address God...God addresses the people," and the people address one another. Professor Wolterstorff's appeal to dialogue is, I take it, literal. It is a direct speaking and listening between persons, or subjects. "Throughout the liturgy," he argues,"God's presence is not that of some object to be contemplated, but that of one who acts...We speak to God and God speaks to us. When God speaks, we listen. We do not look...we listen." For Professor Wolterstorff, contemplation is not only different from, it is exclusive of dialogue; while we can "contemplate" other persons, to do so is to reduce them to the status of an object, a "spectacle" in the usual sense. The ancient Greeks did not see it this way, Professor Wolterstorff concedes, precisely because they were too busy looking. For "the classical Greek philosophers," at least,"the primary metaphors for our relation to the divine were visual." In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, by contrast, "the primary metaphors are verbal and auditory." These are the antique sources in which Professor Wolterstorff's account of liturgy has its roots. Let us turn, first, to the methodological issues. Professor Wolterstorff and I have different conceptions of where and how philosophical ideas might be situated. The sources to which I am primarily returning are not "the classical Greek philosophers," though I do mention them. In fact, the ideas about theory and practice, craft and contemplation that I develop in the lecture are not usually associated with Plato and Aristotle. I mention them partly to show that their ways of thinking might have roots that are even more "antique" than most modern interpreters take them to be (that they echo a more ancient understanding of theoria and techne). This is not to say that these roots are practical rather than philosophical. It is an attempt to locate philosophical contemplation in a "doing "—like dancing, or shipbuilding—rather than a purely intellectual (or detached) kind of vision. Meanwhile, my references to Homer should remind us that the gods of the Greeks were, in fact, highly personalized. The idea of kosmos as a formally abstract but concretely realized pattern suggestive of divinity was not one that philosophers like Plato and Aristotle introduced only later on. The Greeks who saw the divine come to light (and to life) in the patterns of a woven cloth were the same Greeks who thought and talked about the gods in highly personalized ways. |
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